António Coelho

University of Porto | UP · Departamento de Engenharia Informática

Background: Post-Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS) affects 50-75% of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) survivors, causing physical, cognitive, and psychiatric impairments. Conventional rehabilitation methods have shown limited efficacy in addressing PICS. Therefore, innovative approaches are essential to enhance patient outcomes. Objective: This systematic re...

The potential of digital games, when transformed into Serious Games (SGs), Games for Learning (GLs), or game-based learning (GBL), is truly inspiring. These forms of games hold immense potential as effective learning tools as they have a unique ability to provide challenges that align with learning objectives and adapt to the learner’s level. This...

In this study we explore the impact of multisensory stimuli in virtual reality on users’ emotional responses, addressing a knowledge gap in this rapidly evolving field. Utilizing a range of sensory inputs, including taste, haptics, and smell, in addition to audiovisual cues, this study aims to understand how different combinations of these stimuli...

Virtual reality and emotions have become inseparable concepts over the past few years, supported by the increasing number of studies relating them. However, these studies' methodologies are often poorly justified or dependent on the authors' subjective definition of emotion and its classification. Moreover, frequently, these studies only consider t...

This article investigates the role of storytelling in video game localisation and its impact on players’ immersion and overall gaming experience. While these topics have been extensively studied and developed within the research community, there is still a lack of information combining them in a practical study specific to a particular genre or vid...

This article investigates the role of storytelling in video game localisation and its impact on players’ immersion and overall gaming experience. While these topics have been extensively studied and developed within the research community, there is still a lack of information combining them in a practical study specific to a particular genre or vid...

Clinical decision support systems have been increasingly utilized in the healthcare industry to improve patient outcomes and enhance clinical decision-making, taking advantage of the growing digital medical data. Despite their potential, there are still obstacles in an extensive adoption of these systems, such as low usability and human factors. In...

Introduction: Emergency department visits have increased substantially, leading to a significant rise in waiting time for patients. Several kiosk-based solutions have been introduced to reduce waiting times in healthcare facilities and to increase efficacy and user satisfaction. Purpose of the Study: This systematic review aims to identify the most...

Objectives There is a growing interest in mindfulness-based programs. Yet, research in the area is limited, and little is known about the factors that moderate the effects of these programs. The two-fold aim of this study was (1) to examine the effects of a mindfulness-based program on dispositional mindfulness, inattention and emotional lability,...

Video games have become an increasingly popular and influential form of entertainment in recent years, with a growing market and diverse range of players. As a result, there is a need to better understand and improve various aspects of the video game industry, including storytelling, localisation, and immersion. Storytelling in video games refers t...

The objective of this work was to support the sustainable deployment of immersive learning environments, which face varied obstacles, including the lack of support infrastructures for active learning pedagogies. Sustainability from the perspective of the integration of these environments in educational practice entails situational awareness, worklo...

Chairing online Master Programmes requires constant monitoring and decision-making, amidst diversified data and ongoing processes. If misunderstood or misinterpreted, poor decisions may result, as well as lost opportunities to support enrolled students. Decision-making can be supported by dashboards, but there are few prototypes which underwent lim...

Intelligent wheelchairs aim to improve mobility limitations by providing ingenious mechanisms to control and move the chair. This paper aims to enhance the autonomy level of intelligent wheelchair navigation by applying reinforcement learning algorithms to move the chair to the desired location. Also, as a second objective, add one more chair and m...

We present a literature review that aims to understand the role of the Educational Escape Room (EER) in improving the teaching, learning, and assessment processes through an EER design framework. The main subject is to identify the recent interventions in this field in the last five years. Our study focuses on understanding how it is possible to cr...

Objectives Research into the effectiveness of mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) in school settings has grown substantially. However, studies in the field are still scarce, present methodological limitations, and fail to examine how children’s characteristics influence MBPs’ effects. The twofold aim of this study was to analyze the effectiveness of...

Playful Learning won a prominent place in the different levels of education, and the Educational Escape Room (EER) is one of the many playful approaches to enhance student motivation. Furthermore, we argue that EERs activities facilitate learning strategies and improve teaching-learning and assessment processes. In an Escape Room, players must sol...

The use of digital games as support tools for education has proven to be effective. To explore their potential, it is crucial to design them carefully. This chapter considers the design of games for education, where players cultivate their knowledge and practice their skills by multiplying numerous hindrances during gaming. Educational elements are...

This paper approaches agency as the primary mode of involvement with information design. We are particularly interested in the design of information in a digital interface. We consider that agency as a mode of involvement can frame the dimension of information design in a digital interface. In order to do so, the close reading method was applied to...

Reducing office buildings’ energy consumption can contribute significantly towards carbon reduction commitments since it represents ∼40% of total energy consumption. Major components of this are lighting, electrical equipment, heating, and central cooling systems. Solid evidence demonstrates that individual occupants’ behaviors impact these energy...

Despite the growing concern and several efforts to make museums accessible to visually impaired publics, their participation in these institutions is still limited, frustrating their desired inclusion. These visitors often experience multiple barriers in museological environments, and there is a lack of assistive technologies to promote access to e...

Video games have become one of the predominant forms of entertainment in our society, but they have also impacted many other of its social and cultural aspects [...]

This paper focuses on developing and assessing a non-obtrusive and transformative method, based on virtual reality, to evaluate science communication projects in science centres. The method was tested using deep-sea cutting-edge scientific content. We applied a mixed design, with 72 adult participants randomly assigned to experimental conditions (w...

Content generation is a heavy task in virtual worlds design. Procedural content generation techniques aim to agile this process by automating the 3D modelling with some degree of parametrisation. The novelty of this work is the procedural generation of the marine alga (Asparagopsis armata), taking into consideration the underwater environmental fac...

Online masters’ program chairs need up-to-date information to monitor efficiently and effectively all the courses in the program for which they are responsible. Learning Management Systems supporting the operation of the online programme collect vast amounts of data about the learning process. These systems are geared to support individual teachers...

We discuss challenges, methodologies, and approaches for teaching Computer Graphics (CG) courses in a confinement context, together with assessing the experience and the proposal of guidelines. Our approach balances CG topics’ depth with creating relevant and attractive content for a CG course while coping with communication, support, and assessmen...

Training in VR can reduce risks and costs while allowing frequent and diversified experiential learning activities. We present a novel VR immersive authoring tool for experiential learning courses with industrial machinery. A trainer can create a course from scratch,defining all its components (structure, models, tools, and settings).The actions wh...

The use of VR in industrial training contributes to reduce costs and risks, supporting more frequent and diversified use of experiential learning activities, an approach with proven results. In this work,we present an innovative immersive authoring tool for experiential learning in VR-based training. It enables a trainer to structure an entire VR t...

Although new, renewed, and innovative museum experiences are constantly provided to the sighted public, millions of visually impaired persons worldwide are still deprived of access to enjoying and engaging with collections. This research aims to investigate the limitations of blind or partially sighted persons in visiting a museum nowadays. Semi-st...

Energy efficiency in buildings can be enhanced by several actions: encouraging users to comprehend and then adopt more energy-efficient behaviors; aiding building managers in maximizing energy savings; and using automation to optimize energy consumption, generation, and storage of controllable and flexible devices without compromising comfort level...

In this paper, we adopt design methods from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to propose enhanced measurements for Reaction Time (RT). To this end, we developed a RT system as a turtles racing game, which, ultimately, aims to foster Serious Games methodologies to study and assess the focus of attention (FOA), motor and cognitive skills in the childr...

Computer-aided design (CAD) and 3D modeling are similar, but they have different functionalities and applications. CAD is a fundamental tool to create object models, design parts, and create 2D schematics from 3D designed objects that can later be used in manufacturing. Meanwhile, 3D modeling is mostly used in entertainment, to create meshes for an...

Although the growing concern to make museums accessible to individuals with visual impairments, their participation in these institutions is still limited, given the multiple barriers they often experience and the lack of assistive technologies to promote access. This research investigates the perspectives of 72 blind and partially sighted individu...

Office buildings consume a significant amount of energy that can be reduced through behavioral change. Gamification offers the means to influence the energy consumption related to the activities of the office users. This paper presents a new mobile gamification platform to foster the adoption of energy efficient behaviors in office buildings. The g...

Serious Pervasive Games extend the magic circle (Huizinga, 1938) to the players' context and surrounding environment. The blend of both physical and fictive game worlds provides a push in player engagement and promotes situated learning approaches. Space and time, as well as social context, acquire a more meaningful impact on the gameplay. From per...

People with visual impairments generally experience many barriers when visiting museum exhibitions, given the ocular centricity of these institutions. The situation is worsened by a frequent lack of physical, intellectual and sensory access to exhibits or replicas, increased by the inaccessibility to use ICT-based local or general alternative or au...

This article introduces a Special Issue that gathers a collection of effective tools to promote the teaching and learning of writing in school-aged and university students, across varied contexts. The authors present the theoretical rationale and technical specificities of writing tools aimed at enhancing writing processes (e.g., spelling, revising...

Apresenta as conclusões do Seminário e os textos das comunicações dos participantes sobre práticas bem-sucedidas e reflexões sobre o tema dos videojogos e o seu ensino.

Accurate 3D reconstruction and realistic visualization of cultural heritage allow experts to fine-tune their theories on the lost links in the history of civilization. Although the 3D reconstruction is a significant challenge, precisely because of the state of degradation over the years, it constitutes a crucial task for experts to study and intera...

This article presents an approach that allows the reuse of choreographies of digital stories, regardless of the platform for which they have been developed. Nowadays, story choreographies are linked to either game technology, simulations or interactive animations for which they have been implemented, so they become unavailable as these platforms be...

To contribute in filling in the gap regarding experiences targeted at and evaluated by teenagers in museums, we involved 78 teenagers aged 16-19 to test three different gamified tours developed by cultural heritage professionals from the Natural History Museum of Funchal, Portugal. The digital tours can be described as follows: 1) expositive - thro...

Evaluation has moved up the agenda in Science Communication. However, some procedures, while available, may be too obtrusive to use recursively in science centers and/or conflict with visitors’ agendas. Our idea is to develop a non-obtrusive, valid and replicable method to evaluate audience attitudes about science communication projects through an...

The prevention of falls in older adults is an issue that can only be solved with regular exercises, sometimes with the supervision of therapists. This paper presents a game framework that uses devices such as the Wii Balance Board (WBB) to replicate fall-prevention programs, such as the Otago Exercise Programme. The objective is to increase the adh...

This submission describes the analysis of an evaluation of 155 teenagers (15–19 years old) who took part in a co-design session centred around how mobile technology might enhance their own experiences in a natural history museum. At the end, participants were required to make a word association to evaluate the session. An analysis of how teen parti...

Complexity is core part of our lives. Aware or not, people need to understand and communicate complex ideas and perspectives. Understanding and communicating complexity can be facilitated through interactive simulations. Doing so in the physical world is often impractical, however. Users and developers are overloaded with information and ambiguity,...

With the appearance of new treatments, it's essential to keep the health professionals properly updated. There is a growing need to train medical teams and it is not always possible to find adequate means to do so. New technologies can play an important role in the training of medical teams, since they have characteristics that allow them to simula...

Invasive species are a major environmental problem affecting Portugal and the rest of the world. As such it is important to promote scientific literacy and environmental awareness on this topic. In this article we present a serious game for environmental awareness, "Invasive Plants". The game's goal is to eliminate several invasive species using th...

This article presents a medical simulation solution. This solution allows a physician to train a clinical scenario by interacting with a graphical interface. The aim is to instigate the learning and internalization of clinical procedures. Currently these resources have been intensifying in the most diverse areas, being our focus, Medicine. Within t...

Museums promote cultural experiences through exhibits and the stories behind them. Nevertheless, museums are not always designed to engage and interest young audiences, especially teenagers. Throughout this paper, we discuss teenagers as an important group to be considered within the Children-Computer Interaction field, and we report some technique...

The moment immediately before the “add to cart” decision is very critical in online shopping. Drawing on theories of transfer, spreading activation and human-computer interaction, the superiority of markerless Augmented Reality (AR) and Marker-based augmented reality (M) over Conventional Interactive (CI) is hypothesized. Although those multimedia...

The personal characteristics of entrepreneurs can be importantly related to entrepreneurial startup intentions and behaviors. A country-moderated hypothesis including the relationship between an individual’s risk-taking propensity and entrepreneurship (behaviors or intentions of the person) was conceptually developed and empirically tested in this...

Procedural modeling techniques reduce the effort of creating large virtual cities. However, current methodologies do not allow direct user control over the generated models. Associated with this problem, we face the additional problem related to intrinsic ambiguity existing in user selections. In this paper, we propose to address this problem by us...

Creating an augmented reality (AR) urban tourism application presents several interactivity challenges on how to convey an engaging multimedia experience on-site. This article describes a methodology for fast prototyping of multimedia mobile applications dedicated to urban tourism storytelling with special focus on AR techniques. Following the less...

Building automation systems contribute to reduce electricity costs by managing distributed energy resources in an efficient way. However, a large share of consumption cannot be optimized through automation alone, since it mainly depends on human interactions. Gamification can be used as one form of changing users’ behaviours [1], but its implementa...

Software developers usually work as a team and in order to improve the team organization and performance several companies use agile methodologies. The efficiency of this methodologies can be improved by the use of project management tools. Several software developers are difficult to motivate on the usage of these tools, as they often claim being...

Building automation systems, by managing distributed energy resources, can contribute to reduce electricity costs. But there is a large range of consumption that cannot be optimized, because it depends of the human behaviours. So we propose to use gamification techniques merged with building automation solutions to enable behavioural demand respons...

Museums promote cultural experiences through the exhibits and the stories behind them. Nevertheless, museums are not always designed to engage and interest young audiences, particularly teenagers. This Ph.D. proposal in Digital Media explores how digital technologies can facilitate Natural History and Science Museums in fostering and creating immer...

This paper describes a user-driven innovation study conducted with teenagers of Madeira Island to probe their desires for technology aided experiences inside a natural history museum. After gathering the results of the sessions with 43 teens (15-17 years old), such results were shown to 17 students of museum curatorship course at the local universi...

Museums promote cultural experiences through the exhibits and the stories behind them. Nevertheless, museums are not always designed to engage and interest young audiences, especially the “net generation”. According to the Falk model of visitor user experience, the visitor uses their visit experience to improve and change their sense of identity an...

The GReSBAS project (2016-2019) aims to enable the active participation of buildings in DR programs through gamified competition between building owners. In case of large buildings, gamified competition can be established within the building for its occupants, for instance having different floors of the building competing between them. This approac...

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the resistance of Staphylococcus aureus recovered from wild boars, to analyze their genetic lineages, and to investigate the susceptibility to oxacillin. Samples from mouth and nose of 45 wild boars (Sus scrofa) were collected during hunt activity from November 2012 to January 2013 in the North of Portug...

Virtual Reality (VR) has been recently gaining interest from researchers and companies, contributing to the development of the associated technologies that aim to transport its users to a Virtual Environment (VE) by the stimulation of their senses. Technologies such as Head-Mounted Displays (HMD), capable of presenting 360 video in 3D, are becoming...

In this poster, we are addressing the topic of “system’s evaluation” from the point of view of assessing the usability of a gamified experience with 20 teenagers aged 15–17 years. The currently tested experience was ideally designed for children 9–10 years. In order to adapt the application to teenagers, we tested it with 20 targeted users. In this...